Want to have a forum on your website, but think it’s too hard to do? Well, things just got easier. The only decision to make is what kind of forum is wanted. A hosted forum or an Open Source forum? What’s the difference?
A hosted forum is where a website that hosts the program on their servers, takes care of everything for the forum. The user doesn’t have to do any updating, maintenance, error fixing, or searching through code for mistakes. It’s easy! People sign in, post their messages and their messages are saved on the page for others to see. Hosted forums can have limited numbers of categories; they may or may not be fully customizable and there’s no downloading or installation.
Open Source is Fully Customizable
An Open Source forum is much the same, yet different. This is a program received in the form of code that can be altered or edited to look and act in customizable ways on a web page. Since the user edits the code, they can create as many categories as they like.
Open Source means that the webmaster downloads and installs the program and must do all the maintenance and updating themselves, and since the server belongs to the user there are no minimum system requirements that must be met.
There are ups and downs to both methods, but it’s easy to decide what to do by looking at the requirements it will take to operate the forum. Time is a given cost, but what if something goes wrong? Does the user have the knowledge to find the problem in the code and fix it?
If not, a hosted forum is the best answer; leave those problems to someone who knows what they’re doing. The user’s experience and comfort with such software is a very important factor in making the decision.